Word: rebels
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...After two decades of conflict, rebel commanders are patient to a fault. But they have never undertaken a major offensive involving thousands of troops organized in numerous brigades, each with its own artillery and armored vehicles. "An offensive of this size is going to be a first for all these commanders," says a Western military specialist. "And it's not at all clear how they'll do." The Alliance forces stationed north of Kabul possess 100 tanks and other armored vehicles, but they may not be deployed in ways that inflict maximum damage. Afghans tend to split their armor into...
...That's why the Alliance needs American advisers, and why it may wait for more carpet bombs to fall before it tries to take Kabul. The U.S. hopes the fall of Mazar will set off a string of rebel victories in the north, demoralize Taliban forces in the rest of the country and inspire wholesale desertions. Now that a major city has fallen, says Sirrs, "the momentum will start to turn against the Taliban." But those who don't defect will melt into their surroundings, lie low and wait to pounce. "The Taliban is unlike anything we've ever seen...
...began hammering Taliban front lines dug in near Mazar and Kabul and further north, along the Tajik border. Despite U.S. frustration with the Alliance's sluggishness, the complexity of waging war in an alien, booby-trapped environment gave Pentagon strategists little choice but to embrace the rebels as a proxy ground force. For the first time, the Pentagon last week acknowledged that the U.S. has air-dropped guns and horse feed to Alliance forces. Meanwhile, U.S. Green Berets slipped into rebel-held territory and worked to prepare the Alliance's factions for a coordinated assault on Mazar. "Obviously, we needed...
...Heavy rains slowed the rebel advance. Just west of the city, Taliban forces in the old citadel Qala-I-Jangi uncorked a final fusillade from cannons, multibarrel rocket launchers, mortars and fixed machine guns. Alliance troops found hundreds of Taliban fighters--most of them Arab and Pakistani volunteers--holed up in a girls' high school. They were zealots, primed for death: after the Alliance commanders failed to coax them into surrender, a two-hour fire fight broke out, and all the Taliban troops were killed or captured. It was their last stand. The Taliban had set up no defenses inside...
...Alliance has its own elite corps deployed near Kabul. Visiting Western journalists often portray the Alliance's militia of part-time, agrarian soldiers as representative of the rebel force as a whole. But that picture is misleading. A zarbati, or strike unit, of some 1,200 uniformed, well-trained fighters is massed north of the capital. The best of the bunch, the Guards Brigade, was created by the late mujahedin commander Ahmed Shah Massoud--even in death the spiritual leader of the Northern Alliance--and comprises several infantry assault battalions backed up by Russian T-55 and T-62 tanks...